ABOUT
Jack Bailey is a contemporary landscape artist based in Byron Bay whose work exists somewhere between photography and dream.
Through meticulous macro study of wild environments, he isolates fractal moments from the broader panorama. Vignettes that feel vaguely familiar, buried in the psyche. These become large-format still works and, increasingly, screen-based moving image installations. Each one a meditative portal to the natural world.
Still works are presented without glass in locally reclaimed timber frames, designed to extend the work into the space around it. Moving image installations bring the landscape into the room: immersive, looping, alive. Both are driven by the same obsession: seeking out wild and remote landscapes across the world as the beating heart of his practice.
Artist Statement
ATMOSPHERE
A considered exploration of the beauty of darkness, and the brilliance of light.
The duality of the dance, and the purpose it serves. A vague understanding of precarious balance.
My journey has been a sporadically focused effort to better understand cause and effect, to dissect the molten perspective formed by decades of conflicting information, cast downstream from trusted guides. A puritanical need to eject the overwhelming inner dialogue that shapes my point of view.
My practice gives me permission to honour, celebrate and serve the less glossy moments. The delicious black atoms that, despite their heavy presence, dance so delicately, and if removed, would render my vision bland, homogenised, void of emotion, atmosphere, connection and consequence.
It is these shadowed moments, lying beneath obvious beauty, that offer me comfort through warm familiarity.
I have always felt an uncommon affinity with places dark, ancient and unbroken. I find solace in empty landscapes, void of human interference:
Raw.
Rugged.
Elemental.
I find the company of the wild far more affable than that of modern man.
"The more time spent removed from the mediocrity of society, the less we depend upon it."